FLASHBACK 1957

Trash talk

May 18, 2008|BY NANCY WATKINS

We don't know exactly what this garbage can said to passersby--something vague, like "Keep Chicago clean." But what if we'd always had trash cans to tell us how to keep up with waste? In frugal colonial America, a talking trash can would have said, "Are you sure you can't reuse this?" In the early 19th Century, it might have said, "Oh, just throw it out your window." Then, as cities grew: "Hmm, things are piling up around here. Feed it to the pigs." Later on, "Burn it." Then, as the air got too smoky, "Put it in a landfill." And today's talking trash can? It would probably say, "Are you sure you can't reuse this?"

* Tons of residential garbage and recyclables picked up in Chicago each year: 1.1 million.

* Days the garbage barge Mobro wandered the Eastern Seaboard in a futile quest for a place to dump its 3,186 tons of trash in 1987 before winding up where it started, in Islip, N.Y. : 172.

* Year that the American Public Health Association predicted that the garbage disposal would render the garbage can an "anachronism": 1948.

* Name of the talking trash can at Walt Disney World: Push.

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"I know a man who doesn't pay to have his trash taken out. . . . He gift-wraps it and puts it into an unlocked car."

-Henny Youngman

Sources: Tribune archives, news reports, City of Chicago, "The Rotten Truth (About Garbage)," an online exhibition by the Association of Science-Technology Centers Inc. and the Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service.